I work in a call center for a government agency (not going to say which one). This happened around 10 AM.

I had a call from a customer who was having an issue accessing her online account.

I fully ID her following our rules, and most of the call goes by normally. Long story short, it turns out that she will need to go in person to show ID to resolve her issue. This does not please her. 

A piece of information: my supervisor had told us that he would be in meetings with new hires all morning, and that for any supervisor calls, we are to take down their info, and he would call them back.

Caller: “I want to speak to your supervisor.”

Me: “Okay, unfortunately, he’s not available right now, but I can take down your information, and he will call you back by the close of business.”

Caller: “How do you know he’s not available?”

Me: “Because he told us he’s not. But as I said, I can take down your info.”

Caller: “No worries, I’ll wait until he’s available and you can transfer me.”

Me: “You don’t understand, he’s not going to be available for a while. I cannot transfer you.”

Caller: “No, I’ll wait.”

Me: “Ma’am, that is not an option I offered. I can either take down your information, or I can disconnect the call.”

Caller: “No, I know you can’t disconnect. I’ll wait.”

Me: “Okay, well, thank you for calling [Agency], have a great day.” *Disconnects.*

I don’t understand people who think I can hold on the phone for at least two hours waiting for a supervisor, especially in a situation where the supervisor is going to tell them the same thing I said. I immediately informed my supervisor that I had to disconnect, and he was okay with it.

I am physically disabled. I got a placard for my car and a wheelchair at the age of eighteen. At the time of this event, I was twenty-three, but looked younger.

One day, I was at my local grocery store trying to go about my life. I was parked in a disabled spot and was walking towards my trunk to get my wheelchair out (I am only a part-time user).

This elderly customer (who looked in her seventies) saw me at the parking spot while I was sitting down in my chair. 

She comes up to me and starts ranting at me about how I’m lazy, that I’m too young to need a chair and parking spot. That I’m stealing that spot from someone who REALLY needs it. 

I kept trying to explain to her I’m disabled and need both the spot and chair, but she kept yelling over me.

At this point, she had called me lazy, fat, and a bunch of slurs I’m not comfortable repeating.

She finally says:

Customer: “Prove you’re disabled. PROVE YOU NEED THIS SPOT MORE THAN A REAL DISABLED PERSON!”

So, I do. I started to manually dislocate my left shoulder, followed by some of my fingers and wrist. I even went and started to do the same to my knee before she told me to stop.

Customer: “Are you crazy?! It’s disgusting for you to do that in front of me!”

Me: “Believe I’m disabled now?”

She walked away.

Before people ask, I have EDS (Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome). I’m so lax in my joints I can purposely dislocate most of them. It is not something I do on purpose often.

Many years ago, I had some hospitality tickets for Formula 1 at Silverstone (I think it was the year Hamilton won his first season).

I decide to get some binoculars to take with me, so I go to the local electronics shop and talk to a very nice sales lady, who seems genuinely excited at the idea of going to F1 at Silverstone. She suggests some binoculars, and I get my wallet out.

At which point, the sales guy comes bounding over, pushes the sales lady out of the way, grabs the binoculars I was going to buy from her, and asks:

Sales Guy: “What are you thinking of using them for?”

He barely lets me answer as he grabs some that my sales lady had already discounted (because they were twice as much) and suggests that they would be a much better option. 

Mildly irritated at this point – I was enjoying chatting to the sales lady – I listed some of the reasons that she told me they weren’t a good fit.

Sales Guy: *Rolls his eyes.* “She’s just a trainee, and the [expensive model] is really the one you want.”

Eventually, it takes quite a stern ‘no’ to stop him from trying to upsell me.

At this point, I really just want to walk out of the shop, but I suffer from the occasionally debilitating condition of being English, and that kind of embarrassment is just too much to take. Instead, I’ll buy them and go home fantasising about all of the cool things I should have said.

So, card in hand, I’m just about to pay, and he asks:

Sales Guy: “Do you want insurance?”

Me: “No, just that thanks.”

Sales Guy: “You really should have insurance. They are very delicate; it doesn’t take much to knock a lens out of alignment.”

Me: “No, it’s fine. Just the binoculars, please.”

Sales Guy: “You probably shouldn’t buy them without the insurance.”

Finally given a way out, I nod and agree, and he runs out the back to get the paperwork for the insurance. He comes back and asks me for my name ‘for the insurance.’

Me: “Oh no, sorry, I was agreeing with you that I shouldn’t buy them, not if they are that delicate. I’m quite clumsy, so I’d definitely break them.”

He tries to backtrack on some of the ones that the sales lady had suggested, saying that they would actually be perfect for me. I reminded him that he said they weren’t very good.

Then I thanked him for helping me see that I really didn’t need to spend all of that money on binoculars and walked out.

A brief summary of the conversations over the last month:

Me: “So, how much of your data do you need to migrate?”

Client’s Head of IT: “Should just be some person records, some company records. That about right [Operations Manager]?”

Client’s Operation Manager: “Yeah, not even. Just a subset of that.”

Me: “So it’s just flat data? Like one row for one person, no linked tables?”

Client’s Head of IT: “Correct. And we don’t even need much there, just the basic name, address, phone number, etc will do.”

Me: “How clean is the data? Are you sending all of it and expecting us to clean it, or are you sending just the stuff you want to keep?”

Client’s Head of IT: “Oh, we definitely don’t want that in the new system, so we will just send over the parts we want.”

Me: “Are you sure? Are you absolutely doubly sure? Pinky promise, no take-backsies?”

Client’s Head of IT: “Yeah, but tell you what, let’s have a call next week with our data guy.”

Today:

Data Guy: “Yeah, so we have two unique databases we need to merge, one in India and one in England. Hundreds of thousands of people and client records, millions of contact log records. For each worker, there will be around a hundred unique fields that need to be mapped, and for each worker, around a thousand records for previous work history and communication logs, an unknown amount of documents, but let’s say at least 20 PDFs per person. There are around two hundred directly relevant tables, but a lot more that could be useful.”

Me: “Do you want some of this or all of it?”

Data Guy: “…yes? Obviously everything. We need this import so that you can perform a data cleanse, fix duplicates, fill in missing info, sort it properly, etc., as we don’t have the capacity to do it ourselves.”

I should know better at this point, I fall for it every time.

I got a job in construction as a labourer when I was fresh out of college. My mum would pack me food to eat in the breakroom, which I stored in the fridge. Someone would steal it, and I’d be sad and hungry. When I caught the guy doing it, he laughed: “What are you going to do about it?”

The guy was a contractor while I worked direct. There wasn’t much I could do about it. My workmates told me to just ignore it; he’d be gone in a few weeks anyway, but I was fuming and a little hangry. I confronted the guy, but his workmates didn’t say anything. He laughed and ended things by saying, “Go make your food un-eatable then.”

This brought me down a rabbit hole that would consume the rest of my life.

I went straight to the shop and bought out the hottest hot sauce I could find on the shelves. I added it to everything I took to work. I ended up liking it so much I started using it at home too. The guy called me a prick for spiking my food, and it never disappeared from that site again.

I started using more and more hot sauce before realising I wanted more. I wanted hotter. I bought some hot sauces online. (Psycho juice if anyone is interested) I started by buying some 70% Red Savina. I moved on to 70% ghost pepper and eventually Carolina Reaper. I became obsessed with the high I would get from eating it.

I started buying everything hot I could find. Popcorn, pork scratchings, nuts, fudge, chocolate limes, spice rubs, and capsaicin extract. You name it, if a hot version exists, I’ve probably bought it. I added it to all of my food. I go to restaurants either with a jar of spice rub or a bottle of hot sauce. I added ghost pepper flakes to my cooking. Anything not chillied wasn’t edible for me. My friends and family thought I was insane.

Fast forward about ten years. I’m still into chilli. I’ve moved industries a few times and changed jobs many times. My food has disappeared one other time. All the people I work with know, a new guy came in and stole my food. They accused me of spiking my food and trapping them. I got a laugh out of listening to my friends laughing at him, saying, “Dude, he does that with all of his food.” The lads love it when I bring in some weird Carolina Reaper snack. I’ve had two people with tears streaming down their faces, chucking UHT milk warm from the cupboard.

I’ve just finished growing my first ghost pepper plant. I bought a bottle of blue dragon siracha, chopped two chillis up fine, and added that to the sauce, which is what prompted me to make this post. This all happened because someone stole food from an eighteen-year-old labourer.